Day 6 in Hangzhou

Today was a pretty long day. In the late morning we headed to the airport to catch a flight to Hangzhou. It was only a 2.5 hour flight, but the whole ordeal of getting 20 people to the airport, checking in, boarding, etc. was pretty tiring. We arrived in Hangzhou (just South of Shanghai) around 4:00 in the afternoon and met our tour guide Joe. Right away I noticed a drastic difference between this city compared to Xian and Beijing. The roads and sidewalks were spotless, the air was clear and there was tons of greenery. As we approached the city, the highway was lined with modern, multi-colored houses that were all different (yet all the same). Joe told us that each house was for 5 people – I couldn’t believe how much space people got. The city seemed to have an orderly, carefully constructed, communist feel to it that continued to the downtown area. The sky scrapers and cityscape seemed modern and calculated.

After driving for about an hour we got to our destination for the night. Our professor told us to dress warm because we were going to walk around a lake and then head to the “Song Dynasty” show. We got out of the bus and walked towards this area that looked like a cross between Disney world (without the rides) and King Richard’s Fair (yet Chinese) – weird I know. When we got to the gate we were bombarded by Chinese tourists . They were so excited to see Americans that they wanted pictures with all of us. Little girls were running up to get pictures with the “American girls”. It was such a weird feeling. Our professor told us that they would most likely go back to their villages and show off their pictures with the Americans. We didn’t sign any autographs, but we were kind of celebrities there for a few minutes, haha.

We got in and had a little over an hour to walk around. Even though it was dark and freezing out, we still had a good time. There were tons of people dressed in traditional Chinese garb serving food, hosting game tables and selling trinkets. A few of us wandered off and found this giant playground. We played on this huge thing that had rope nets, wooden bridges and swings. Next to the playground was this awesome human-sized hamster wheel. It was like a Japanese game show – two Chinese people would get in the wheel, one would inevitably out-run the other, one person would fall and then the other would fall. There were tons of people around laughing - none of us tried it though. After the fun times at the playground we couldn’t find anyoneeee – leave it to me, this was like my 3^rd time getting temporarily lost from the group haha. Our tour guide finally found us and then filled us in that everyone was inside one of the restaurants in the fair drinking tea – we had no idea.

After some tea we headed to the show. We had the front 2 rows of seats in the theater (which wasn’t heated!). The show was awesome – tons of dancing, intricate costumes and acrobatics. Most of the songs were in Chinese, so I didn’t understand much of the story-line…but it was still cool.

After the show we went to a late dinner and had a cake for Phil’s birthday! What I thought was going to be a fairly easy travel day ended up being a pretty long day, but a good one. I was so happy to finally check into our hotel.